Ugh, fine. I will. TNGOP, come closer. Not that close. No, I’m not trying to have an affair with you. Put that beer back in the fridge! You have to drive home. Is someone pushing me? TNGOP, go stand over there! With your hands where I can see them.
Now listen up. Here’s how to play the whole voter ID thing. The only way. Whenever you are asked about it, whenever someone brings up problems with it:
“We are just trying to ensure that the person voting is who he or she says he or she is. The system for getting people IDs has not been as smooth as we had hoped, but we are working with local authorities to make sure that wait times aren’t ridiculous and that the paperwork requirements are clear to everyone before they come in, so that no one has to make multiple trips. That’s my comment. Thank you.”
Then you turn and walk away. Or hide in the bathroom, I don’t care.
What you’re doing–accusing a black woman who had to live through the onerous bullshit of the Jim Crow South in order to vote in her youth, who watched people die so that she could do basic citizen things like vote and go out in public and eat wherever the hell she wanted, of being exploited? It is so dumb that it hurts my heart. It’s literally causing me to advise you to stop doing things this stupid and I want you to lose. I’ve had to set aside my own best interest in order to try to convince you to stop being such dumbasses.
You know what old people don’t love? Having it insinuated that they’re too stupid to know their own minds. That they don’t come to the voting booth or to your bullshit rinky-dink efforts to make it difficult for them to vote without decades of experience in exactly your type of patronizing bullshit.
It’s deeply condescending to say that Dorothy Cooper is being exploited. She’s just old. She’s not an idiot.
So, shape the fuck up, assholes.
Tiny Cat Pants 
That is their shape, B.
Ha ha ha.
Speaking for us assholes, let me clarify a few things.
1) Mrs. Cooper is not being exploited in the sense that someone is selling her a faulty used car or stealing her SS info in order to set up false accounts. No one in the Republican Party is suggesting that she is doing anything wrong.
You can argue the semantics of Adam’s statement but he was not implying that Mrs. Cooper is guilty of anything. Did he in any way blame her for anything? No.
2) The Democrats are exploiting Mrs. Cooper’s situation. Period. There have been all of two of these cases that have come to light. That is hardly the definition of an effort to disenfranchise whole legions of voters.
This practice of trying to discredit good legislation or trying to force bad legislation based on a few unique instances is something both parties are guilty of. This is one more instance and the TNDP knows it.
Mark, your comment makes no sense. What does guilt have to do with anything?
There have been all of two cases in two weeks. Let’s not pat ourselves on the back just yet. Let’s maybe wait and see what happens this week.
And I still think that you’re still viewing Cooper as a stupid pawn of the Democrats. Let me reiterate–she’s a black woman who’s been voting since before Jim Crow went out of fashion.
Could be that she’s exploiting the Democrats. Her agenda is people not being disenfranchised by stupid hoops that don’t prevent any of the documented ways voter fraud happens. If the Democrats want to get on board with that, great. If she alone has to embarrass Tennessee, also great.
Just a thought.
Mark, what do you think the word “exploit” means? I looked in the OED and it is kinda vague. Here’s just two definitions there:
a. To accomplish, achieve, execute, perform; to fight (a battle).
(although this is marked as obsolete)
b. To utilize for one’s own ends, treat selfishly as mere workable material (persons, etc.); to ‘make capital out of’.
You seem to think that the Republicans meant a. in the link B provided – for reasons you neither provide nor any that I can even imagine.
But then you yourself suggest that maybe b. might be more true than a. That, or you think the Democrats’ end is bad. But then that has nothing to do with exploitation, with or without a negative connotation. You’re suggestion seems to be that they are exaggerating or making a hasty generalization.
Why not just say that? Why defend an indefensible comment instead of clearly correcting, or substituting, your own interpretation? Then maybe we can have a conversation. I still think you’re wrong. Two in two weeks is too many. And it wasn’t just a little difficult for Cooper. She should get to tell her story about all she’s seen in her lifetime and the particularly significant and repeated problems she had recently.
When the Dems make public their video, you can react and decide if they’ve concluded more than her evidence permits. No one should decide in advance.
Allow me to chime in here. Thanks.
Let’s not allow this focus on whatever the Democrats might be doing to obscure the underlying cravenness (?) of the Republicans passing a law that they know will have a disproportionate effect on poor, elderly, and African-American voters. Any protestations to the contrary are bullshit. As you point out, B., the stated purpose– to prevent voter fraud– is a solution where there was virtually no problem. That leaves the only other obvious goal, which we’ve already covered. Focusing on what the Democrats might do with Mrs. Cooper’s testimony– which we can safely presume, given her experience, that she is quite eager to offer– is a dodge, and I wouldn’t justify it by treating is a respectable, honest argument.